Common Themes

Let me just state up front that I found the “stars” of American Chopper completely and utterly OBNOXIOUS… but they did happen to do a really spectacular tribute bike themed around Space Shuttle Discovery’s Return to Flight mission in 2005, STS-114.

Orange County Choppers‘ site is all Flash-based, so I can’t give a direct link to the photo album of this bike, but it’s on the third page of “On-Air Theme Bikes”, under the Choppers section on the main page. I’ve taken screencaps to show here.

The bike’s episodes are #58 & #59, which aired October 3 & 10, 2005. Minus the stars’ antics, fights and general… drama… the bike is a thing of beauty, and if these guys have one thing right, it’s an eye for minute detail. The gas tank is shuttle-shaped, the exhaust pipes (shown below, my favorite detail) are tipped with a replica of the Space Shuttle Main Engines, and the airbrush work and detailed painting throughout is just… spectacular. I particularly like the miniature orbiting shuttle “spinners” on the wheels, front and back. The gallery is definitely worth a look!

These fascinating stamps are from Fujeira, a part of the United Arab Emirates. The artwork highlights Gemini and Apollo milestones (possibly Mercury as well, looking more closely at the capsule stamp.) The images are artistic and vividly colored. I wish I could find better pictures, or at the very least, ones without postmarks (or whatever that over-stamping in gold ink is.)

I wrote an editorial piece titled Why I gave up on NASA on my blog this morning; give it a read!

NASA Images is a great new(er) resource developed last year as a joint project between NASA and Archive.org. If you’ve been looking for a one-stop resource for everything NASA does, you just found it!

NASA Images is a service of Internet Archive ( www.archive.org ), a non-profit library, to offer public access to NASA’s images, videos and audio collections. NASA Images is constantly growing with the addition of current media from NASA as well as newly digitized media from the archives of the NASA Centers.

The goal of NASA Images is to increase our understanding of the earth, our solar system and the universe beyond in order to benefit humanity.

U.S. Human Spaceflight: A Record of Achievement, 1961-2006 is a monograph from NASA’s History Division, covering every human spaceflight mission from Mercury 1 on. Download the PDF here, or write for a free paper copy:

U.S. Human Spaceflight: A Record of Achievement, 1961-2006 (Monograph in Aerospace History No. 41) was compiled by Judith A. Rumerman and updated by Chris Gamble and Gabriel Okolski. This handy and richly illustrated reference work is an updating of the similarly titled Monograph 9 that was published in 1998. Interested readers may obtain a free copy of this monograph by sending a self-addressed, stamped 9×12″ envelope ($2.84 domestic first-class postage for 13 ounces) to the NASA Information Center, NASA HQ, Washington, DC 20546 or by coming in person to the NASA History Division in room CO72 of NASA Headquarters.

For this week’s Perspective, I chose something that is indeed from a different perspective… literally! The above image was taken from the International Space Station during STS-123:

STS123-E-008018 (21 March 2008) — While docked and onboard the International Space Station, a STS-123 Endeavour crewmember captured the glowing green beauty of the Aurora Borealis. Looking northward across the Gulf of Alaska, over a low pressure area (cloud vortex), the aurora brightens the night sky.

(Download the large version here.)